Russell Davies on Words & Strategy

Russell Davies is a writer and strategist. He's worked on communications and digital strategies for organizations like Honda, Nike, Microsoft, Apple, the Government Digital Service and the Co-op. He's currently Marketing and Product Director for The Modern House. He is the author of Everything I Know About Life I Learned From Powerpoint, DO Interestingness, among others.

All right, Russell, thank you so much for accepting my invitation. I start all my conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend who helps people tell their stories. It’s a big question, which is why I love it—but because it’s so big, I tend to over-explain it, like I’m doing now. Before I ask it, I want you to know you’re in total control. You can answer however you want—or not at all. The question is: Where do you come from?

Oh, you made me nervous then. I come from a small city in the East Midlands of England called Derby.

And what was it like growing up in Derby?

It was fine.

Do you have any recollections? What did you want to be when you grew up—young Russell in Derby?

I wanted to be a musician, but not enough to actually become one. I also wanted to be Clive James, the Australian critic—a very clever man who was one of the first people to take television seriously in writing. He wrote a funny and clever column about popular TV as if it were art. That seemed like the best job there could be.

Do you remember what kind of television he was writing about that made you feel that way?

Everything—arts, news, sitcoms. At the time, he wrote a lot about shows like Dallas and Dynasty. He was a critic but also a poet. He could really write. He was part of that generation of Australians who came to the UK in the ’50s and ’60s and saw Britain with an outsider’s eye—but sometimes they were more inside than the British themselves because of the colonial relationship. I thought, what a great way to make a living.

Where are you now, and what do you do? What’s keeping you busy these days?

I'm not Clive James, sadly. I now live in London, and I work in marketing.

What does it mean to be from the Midlands? I lived in San Francisco for a while and played soccer for a pub team run by a guy from Birmingham. That’s Midlands, right?

Yes—West Midlands.

Okay, so what’s the important distinction? I might fumble here—it’s delicate territory.

It’s like being from the North but without any of the advantages. Only people from the Midlands think the Midlands exists. People from the South just think in terms of North and South. Same with people from the North. I’m not a fan of geographical specialness. Every country thinks it has a unique sense of humor or music culture—but usually, they don’t. The Midlands is like everywhere else. Actually, the East Midlands is special in that it doesn’t think it’s special.

Beautiful. I seem to remember—and correct me if I’m wrong—that you had a slogan or motto on one of your blogs: "I’m as disappointed as you are." Does that ring a bell?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That probably used to be on the blog. Maybe it’s not anymore.

Where did that come from?

That came from when I was working at Wieden+Kennedy in Portland, on the Microsoft business. At the time, Wieden had two big accounts: Nike and Microsoft. All the cool kids worked on Nike. The nerdy kids, like me, worked on Microsoft. They did great ads—we didn’t. Microsoft was clearly unhappy with us. We kept trying to make good ads, and they kept saying, "We don’t need these."

Then Microsoft got sued by the Department of Justice in the late ’90s. They were lining up to fire us, but firing your agency during an antitrust suit looks bad. So they kept paying us—$20 million a year—even though we weren’t doing much.

There were basically two of us on the account: me and the account director, a fantastic woman named Trish. We’d fly to Seattle every week just to hold meetings because they were paying us. At one point, Bob Herbold, then CEO of Microsoft and famously the highest-salaried person in America, decided he wanted a new tagline.

We had previously come up with "Where do you want to go today?"—Jim Riswold wrote that, arguably one of the best taglines ever, after "Just Do It." But no one was working on it anymore. It was just Trish and me. We’d brainstorm taglines on the plane to Seattle. One day, we realized the perfect tagline was: "We’re as disappointed as you are." And yeah, it stuck.

It stuck with me. I felt a strong connection to it.

Imagine how brilliant that company would be if they’d actually used it.

So, your answer earlier about what you’re doing now was a bit reluctant—an ambivalent “marketing.” When did you first realize you could make a living doing... whatever this is that you do?

When I was forced to, I suppose. I left Derby for university and, of course, couldn’t go back. So I moved to London and needed a job.

This was the late ’80s. If you wanted to do something vaguely creative and make a decent living—and your parents weren’t already in the industry—you went into advertising or design. It was a way into creative work.

My view of advertising came from watching Bewitched and Thirtysomething. I thought, "That looks good—I’ll do that."

Wait—Bewitched? I didn’t realize that was what he did.

Yeah. Darren, Samantha’s husband—he was in advertising. He was constantly trying to come up with slogans and would write them on an easel.

Oh, amazing.

Yeah. That’s what I thought advertising was: the client comes in with a bottle of something and says, “I need a slogan,” and you come up with one.

What do you love about the work? You’ve done so many different things—where’s the joy in it, if any?

If any. I mean, I wouldn’t do it if they didn’t pay me.

So, not exactly joyful?

Well, yeah. I think enjoy is different from joy. There are aspects that are interesting, even satisfying. But I think it can be dangerous to talk about work using words like joy, love, and passion. It sets unrealistic expectations—like Instagram. You're only seeing the highlights. So yes, it can be fascinating and engaging, and it’s definitely better than many other jobs. But at the end of the day, it’s still a job. Mostly, it’s about passing the time.

I’m curious—what are you enjoying these days? You mentioned something about semi-retirement. Is that actually the case?

Oh, that was a joke. It’s just been the header on my blog for probably ten years. But people see it and assume I’ve retired. I haven’t.

What I am doing now is getting more comfortable with being older. You know, the happiness researchers say that happiness declines from your mid-30s to your mid-50s, and then starts rising again—basically when you realize you’re never going to achieve what you thought you were, and you get comfortable with that. I’m enjoying being in that phase. I’m very lucky in a lot of ways.

Over the past 10 to 15 years, I’ve mostly worked with people who are much younger than me. I find that really rewarding. It’s energizing—not in the creepy, "youth is energy" way—but because it clarifies what I’m there to do, and what I’m not there to do. I’m there to offer pattern recognition and experience—not energy and ideas. And I quite like that. I enjoy it.

Tell me more—when you say pattern recognition, what does that look like?

Well, when you’ve been doing this work long enough, you realize there are no new problems. You’ve seen the same challenges dozens of times. So someone comes to you and says, “Should we do A or B?” And you just say, “Do A.”

And they ask, “How do you know?” And you say, “Because I’ve seen this before.” Sometimes, that makes you stop and reflect—why do I think A is better than B? That’s interesting to unpack. But most of the time, you’re just helping people resolve Friedkin’s Paradox.

Friedkin’s Paradox?

It goes something like: If you're choosing between two equally attractive options, it’s a very difficult decision—because they’re equally attractive. The paradox is that it doesn’t matter which you choose.

Most branding, marketing, advertising, and communications decisions are like that. You’re rarely in a room with a brilliant idea and a terrible idea. You’re almost always deciding between a few pretty good ones.

And yet, companies will spend six months agonizing over which to choose—when it really doesn’t matter. Having an old guy in the room who can say, “Just do that one,” saves everyone a lot of time.

Deeply liberating, it seems.

Yeah. I once spent about six months working with Coca-Cola in Atlanta, helping them decide whether the fifth brand value for Diet Coke should be fun or funny. And it didn’t matter.

Did you know that at the time?

Yeah. I knew. Partly because this was going on a creative brief, and I knew, A. the creatives wouldn’t read it. B, it wouldn’t change anything anyone did, and C, when it came time to evaluate the work against the brief, we’d spend another six months asking, “Is that fun? Or is that funny?”

But we’ve built an industry and a profession where people are really well-equipped to argue about whether something is fun or funny. We hire people with English degrees—people who understand semantics and who can debate trivial, pointless minutiae for months. And it feels like work.

And honestly, it’s quite fun work. I talk about this in presentations sometimes. I’ll ask, “Who thinks it should be fun? Who thinks it should be funny?” Then I give people a few minutes to think it through, and they come up with very committed points of view.

They’re determined. They’ll say, “It should definitely be fun,” and then give me their rationale. And it still doesn’t matter. So being in rooms and helping people navigate that—that’s valuable. The organizational version of that is called bike shedding. Are you familiar with it?

I think I came across it via Farnam Street—Shane Parrish’s work. It feels like a British expression.

It kind of is. The original idea came from a British columnist named C. Northcote Parkinson in the 1930s. He wrote for the Straits Times, a paper in Hong Kong, and his columns were often humorous.

He coined Parkinson’s Law—“Work expands to fill the time available.” But he also introduced something now called the law of triviality, which became known as bike shedding. He tells the story of a planning committee reviewing whether to build a nuclear power station. They spend about 20 minutes on the nuclear plans—because none of them really understand nuclear energy—so they just say, “Sure, that seems fine.”

Then, the next agenda item is: What color should the bike shed be next to the nuclear plant? They spend six hours debating it—because everyone has an opinion on colors, and everyone has seen a bike shed.

Originally, it was just a little joke column. But sometime in the ’70s or ’80s, maybe later, the idea was picked up in the software development world—because it’s a very common issue in programming and tech.

I first encountered it when I was working at the Government Digital Service. I was in a meeting—and the meeting descended into talking about trivial stuff. But I felt completely comfortable—like, this is what I’ve been doing my whole life. I can talk about trivial stuff for days. I’m good at this. It’s basically what I get paid to do. Then someone said, “Oh, we’re bike shedding.” And everyone else went, “Oh, yes, you’re right. Let’s stop.” And they just moved on.

It was amazing. A tremendous organizational hack. Just by naming the phenomenon, everyone recognized it. “Yes, we are talking about something trivial. Let’s move on.” It was genius. And now, I think that’s one of the things I do—I help people recognize when they’re bike shedding. Like we are now.

When people reach out to you, what kind of questions do they ask? What kinds of projects do you like to take on?

I do a fair bit of traditional brand consultancy work. I also ghostwrite a lot of presentations. People often come to me because they’re trying to express something, and they just can’t quite figure out how to say it. It’s less about consumer-level messaging these days, and more at the organizational level.

Most of what I do is just take what they have and make it shorter. That’s really it—I delete stuff. Because people find that impossible. For whatever reason, people just cannot delete things. So they come to me with all this material and say, “Can you clean this up?” And I do. And I enjoy it. It’s fun. I’ve developed this instinct—whatever I’m looking at, I’m immediately thinking, How can we make this shorter?

My team at the Government Digital Service once joked that I could be replaced by a Slack bot with three automated responses: No, Tea? and Make it shorter.

I wanted to ask you about the Government Digital Service. I know the bike shedding idea from attending small-town planning meetings, but I didn’t realize it could be applied as a kind of corrective—as a hack. I feel like I’ve got a whole new purpose in life now—like bike shedding as a form of intervention. That’s amazing.

How did the Government Digital Service come about for you? The design principles are kind of legendary. I’ve spent time with civic innovators here in the U.S. who are trying to replicate some of that. It’s such a beautiful story, and what you did was so impressive. How did you end up being part of it?

I was very lucky. This would have been around 2011 or 2012. At the time, I was doing a terrible job in some vague strategic planning role—something like “EMEA Strategy Director” at R/GA. We were still feeling the effects of the financial crash, and a lot of the interesting, independent digital businesses in the UK were struggling or shutting down.

We had a coalition government, which is quite rare in the UK, and there had just been a massive IT scandal involving the NHS. They had wasted an enormous amount of money. For the previous 10 or 15 years, a small group of people had been lobbying government—saying, “We should do the internet better. We can do this better.”

Eventually, all these forces aligned. The government needed a project that was non-controversial—because of the coalition—and they needed to save a lot of money. At the same time, this group of smart people, both inside and outside government, suddenly had influence. And that led to the creation of the Government Digital Service (GDS), which was positioned at the center of government and given a rare amount of authority over digital work.

It was a fragmented system. Every department had its own website, its own vendors, its own way of doing things. Everything was outsourced, expensive, and broken. I didn’t know any of this at the time. I was completely oblivious.

Then a friend of mine, Ben Terrett—a designer and frequent blogger—was approached to become Head of Design at GDS. Back then, the blogging community was pretty small, and people across design, tech, and comms kind of knew each other.

We met for breakfast, and he said, “I’ve been offered this job. It sounds terrible. Why would I do this?” Designing government websites wasn’t anyone’s dream gig.

But we talked about it and realized, actually, this was a really interesting problem. It might be the last great web problem. We’d missed out on Web 2.0 and the startup boom. But digital transformation in government? That felt like one of the big things. So Ben took the job.

And I did something I’ve probably never done before or since—I went and asked, “Can I have a job too, please?” I said, “I don’t know exactly what I can do for you, but this seems really interesting. I’d love to be part of it.”

They basically made a role for me. It was essentially Head of PowerPoint. The idea was, “We’re going to need someone to explain what we’re doing—to the rest of government and to the world.” So I handled presentations and blogging.

Ben and I ended up being, in a way, creative directors for GDS. He led design; I led communication and storytelling. I had a small team focused on explanation—making sense of what we were doing.

And that’s when I realized that being in charge of presentations is, in part, being in charge of strategy. You back your way into figuring out what to say by figuring out how to say it.

Can you say more about that?

Sure. It ties into what I was saying earlier about the kind of work I do now. There’s that truism: writing is thinking. To write well, you have to think clearly. And I’d extend that—writing presentations is deciding. To make a good presentation, you have to make choices. You have to say, “I’m going to include this and not that.” You have to commit.

When I was creating presentations at the Government Digital Service, I made up some rules—like, don’t use too many words, make the type big, that kind of thing. And that forced clarity. You had to actually decide what you were going to say. A lot of presentations—especially in government—are filled with hedging and ambiguity. You can tell no one has really committed to a point of view, so the presentation becomes this vague, shapeless thing.

A good example: one of our jobs was to tell government departments they were no longer going to have their own websites. Someone drafted a presentation slide that said something like, “Department websites under review,” or “Ongoing consultation process.” I asked, “Are we saying we’re going to close their websites?” They said yes.

So I said, “Well, we should put that on the slide, then.”

And there’d be pushback—“We can’t say that,” or “It’s too blunt.” But we’d debate it and, ultimately, agree: if that’s what we mean, that’s what we need to say. It forced the team to clarify the message before going into the room, instead of presenting a vague message and being unsure how to respond when someone asks, “What exactly are you saying?” So yeah, in a way, 30-point type became a tool for strategic clarity.

Is that where your PowerPoint book came from?

Yeah. That was the origin. But also, the book came about halfway through my lifelong relationship with PowerPoint. Again, I was just very lucky. I started using it right around the time it was becoming the standard presentation tool. And it just... suited me.

In what way?

Partly just circumstance. For a long time, my career—such as it was—succeeded because I knew how to put images into PowerPoint before most other people did.

Seriously?

Yeah. At the time, it was surprisingly hard. No one knew how to do it. I’d be a junior planner giving a client presentation, and afterward they’d say, “Yeah, that was good... but how did you get the images in there?”

That one skill made me employable. And it’s not much of a stretch to say that’s how I ended up getting the job at Wieden+Kennedy. But also, there’s just something satisfying to me about the combination of words and images and talking. I almost want to say storytelling—though not in the grand, sweeping sense. More like: words, in a linear order, paired with visuals. That process—constructing a narrative slide by slide—is something I genuinely enjoy. Yeah. You know, I like it.

Yeah.

But it’s increasingly irrelevant.

How do you mean?

Well, that kind of work—the set-piece moment—it just doesn’t happen as much anymore in hybrid environments. The pitch, or even the small, micro-pitches throughout the week—presenting work, sharing a plan—that kind of formal moment is becoming rarer.

And PowerPoint, as a tool, is used less and less. It feels a bit like the harpsichord being replaced by the piano. I struggled with that a bit during the pandemic.

People started using Miro—a lot. And I’d be working with someone and say, “Can you show me the strategy stuff?” And they’d share a board. And I’d look at it and say, “OK, I can see you’ve got all the pieces—but what’s the order? Which bit is first? Which is most important?”

And that’s the thing about PowerPoint, whatever else you say about it: it forces you to decide what order things go in. That’s actually quite a big deal. If you’re just presenting a cluster of ideas, that’s a different kind of value. It’s still valuable—but it’s different. It doesn’t force that same kind of decision-making.

Yeah. I want to follow a thread here—maybe circle around it a bit before going right at it. I’m thinking about research. I mean, the GDS design principles famously start with “Start with user needs.” We’ve talked about bike shedding, decision-making, communication. So, how do you feel about research—about user needs—and the role that plays either in your own work or in good brand work more broadly?

There are a few ways to come at that question. What we meant by “user needs” at that moment in time—and in that environment—was actually quite radical. In those early days of web services, for the first time at scale, you could watch what people did rather than ask them what they thought.

After spending 10 or 15 years with both qualitative and quantitative research—and often finding very little value in either—it was revelatory to simply observe behavior. You could say, “OK, people are doing this thing—let’s make it easier for them to do it.” Then you’d move a button slightly to the left, and more people would click it. That kind of feedback loop was powerful.

Now, of course, that approach has since been weaponized in all kinds of problematic ways. But if your goal is to help someone renew a driving license or apply for benefits, it’s an incredible tool.

And at the time, it was also a reaction against how digital services—especially within organizations and government—had been built. They were almost always designed to serve the needs of the organization, not the user.

Take the driving license example. I think it was that. Basically, the transaction required you to answer about five essential questions. But the form had ballooned to 60 questions, because people in government realized that everyone needed a driving license—and that made it a convenient opportunity to ask for all sorts of other information.

So they’d say, “Can we just add this question?” or “Let’s collect data for this department, too.” Over time, the service became more about internal convenience than user need. That happens everywhere. It’s not unique to government.

So being in a position where we had the authority to say, “No, we’re building this for the users,” was meaningful. And, like I said, after spending 20 years fighting against bad market research, it was refreshing to say, “I don’t care what they say—I can see what they’re doing.”

Yeah. And I’d forgotten the context—this was 2011. That kind of behavioral data at scale wasn’t widely accessible yet.

Exactly. Not unheard of, but within the context we were in—government, public service—it was still pretty new. And it was a big part of the shift.

So how did the design principles come to exist? I’m thinking about how I first encountered them—it’s kind of amazing that I ever did. It feels unlikely. Had anyone really articulated what you guys were trying to say before? Or was it new?

It all happened kind of accidentally. The product manager—I think it was him—mentioned something like, "They’ve asked us for a roadmap." Or maybe it was more like, "They’ve asked us for something." We were, in a sense, a substitute for something else that was supposed to happen. It was one of those, “We need a big, long something-or-other,” situations. But there wasn’t time. So the question became: can we just do something?

A group of us started writing. And what we ended up doing—and this has become a key lesson for me—was simply to listen to what people were already saying. We’d hear something good, something interesting, and we’d say, “Yes, let’s use that.” Maybe tidy it up a bit, but essentially we just appropriated the language that was already circulating. It felt new and interesting. No one had really done design principles in that way before. People had written manifestos and so on, but not quite this.

It wasn’t even my idea—someone else suggested we call them "principles." More specifically, “design principles.” And just like the concept of the "bikeshed" as a framing tool, naming them that way gave them weight. It made them feel more concrete, which was especially powerful in an organization that respected things that seemed solid. That gave them real power.

I think the tenth principle was: Make things open; it makes them better. We’d just refer to it as “the tenth principle,” and people would say, “Right, we should share this.” That kind of framing gave it momentum. Looking back, they seem a bit banal now—somewhat self-serving and very much a product of their time. Back then, we thought we were cool and revolutionary… but we weren’t, really.

Still, when I first encountered them, they felt incredibly powerful. And I think part of that power came from who was saying it. This was the British government, after all. It was surprising to hear them talk about openness and agile practices. If Nike had said it, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed. But coming from government? That was exciting.

And honestly, a lot of what I did back then was just cover—creating space while others got on with the real work. Once that work started to take shape—like when we could say, “Look, you can now order your driving license in three minutes instead of thirty”—they didn’t need me anymore. But it was fun. Almost joyful, really.

How have things changed in your industry since you started—whether in advertising, marketing, or branding? You mentioned working with a lot of young people now and being a kind of pattern recognizer. What do you notice is different for them? What do you learn about the field through their eyes?

I think young people have it a lot harder than I did. I came into the industry with a huge amount of privilege. I’m a tall-ish, white, straight man. I had a solid education, fully funded by the state. And I entered advertising at a time when the industry was fat, wealthy, happy—even indulgent. It could afford to let someone like me spend five years figuring out how to be useful.

Then I got very lucky. I spent ten years at Wieden+Kennedy, and they basically wanted exactly what I had to offer. In a 30-year career, I’d say ten of those years were genuinely good and successful—which, honestly, are pretty decent odds. But the landscape has changed. It’s just tougher now. The industry is more fragmented, there's less money, and it doesn’t feel as special.

What do you mean by “less special”?

I mean it’s less good—because it doesn’t need to be. When I was starting out, advertising was a compelling field. It was one of the most creative corners of commercial life. It stood shoulder to shoulder with film, design, and music. That’s not the case anymore.

And I think, on some level, that’s actually a good thing for society. The kind of people who might’ve gone into advertising 20 years ago? They're YouTubers now. They’re creating independently. They don’t need advertising anymore.

In the UK especially—though I think to some extent this is true in the US too—advertising was once where bright, creative, working-class people ended up. They couldn’t get into publishing, museums, or journalism because of structural barriers like the Oxbridge system. So instead, they funneled their creativity into commercial industries like advertising, music, and design. That led to a real flourishing of talent—people like Tony and Ridley Scott, or the Hegartys and Saatchis.

But now, if you’re one of those people, and you can break into the creative industries (which is harder than ever), you’re not going to choose a network ad agency. You’re going to do it on your own terms—on TikTok, YouTube, or wherever you can build your own audience and your own life. So maybe it’s not harder—it’s just different now.

And I know you mentioned offering advice about how to run a meeting, but not so much about how to get a job.

Exactly. I have no idea how someone gets a job now. It’s very different. I’m happy to give advice on things like how to run a good meeting, but career paths today feel unrecognizable to me.

And in some ways, things are better now. I remember someone once saying that in the 1960s, British culture was essentially run by ten white men: the heads of the two TV stations, editors of five national newspapers, the directors of the British Museum and Library, and maybe Charles Saatchi. The accepted mainstream culture was this very singular, mono-everything structure. That’s no longer the case—and that’s undoubtedly a good thing. It’s different now. But different isn’t always worse.

You mentioned having ten “good” years out of a 30-year career. Were there mentors who made a big impact on you? Or certain lessons or touchstones you come back to in your work?

I don’t have an immediate answer to that—which probably means... no, not really. I’ve become more and more aware of just how lucky and privileged I’ve been. So when I talk about mentors or guiding principles, it starts to sound like I had agency in my career, like I planned it all. But honestly, I didn’t. I made a lot of bad decisions and a few good ones.

And the strange thing about history—or about telling your story in hindsight—is that people only talk about the things you did well. So the narrative becomes, “Oh, you did this, and then you did that, and then you did this other brilliant thing.” And I’m sitting there thinking, “Yeah, but I also spent five years doing something that went nowhere and made me miserable.”

That said, while I might not have had formal mentors, I did make a lot of really good friends. And I’ve always wanted to impress them. A lot of the things I’ve done were motivated by admiration—by trying to do something smart enough, good enough, or interesting enough that it would earn their respect. And I think that’s made me better. I’ve been lucky to be surrounded by wise people, and even luckier to be motivated by wanting to impress them.

In the early days of blogging, there was this guy—Chris Heathcote—who ran a blog called Anti Mega. He’s a friend now, I think. If you asked him, I hope he’d say he’s one of my friends. But back then, he was someone I admired from afar.

His blog was intimidating in that very particular way blogs could be—written by someone you’d never met, but who clearly knew everything. Chris wrote about design, food, molecular gastronomy, museums. He worked at Nokia when Nokia was the coolest company on earth. I was completely in awe. I just wanted Chris to like me. I’d write blog posts like, “Chris said this clever thing,” and then riff off it. He was a touchstone, even if he didn’t know it.

Eventually, I wanted to ask him to speak at my own conference. At the time, I was working at Nike, and they paid for me to attend TED in 2005. This was before TED talks were everywhere online—you had to be there. And the talks were amazing. It was the first time I’d seen the 20-minute talk as a kind of performance art. But I hated the networking bits—the mingling before and after. The talks, though, were electric.

After I left Nike and started freelancing, I realized I had saved enough to attend TED again. But then it occurred to me: what if, instead of flying to Monterey and spending all that money on TED, I used that budget to put on my own conference? So I did. I created a small event called Interesting. And, yes—part of the reason was so I could ask Chris to speak. He said yes. He spoke. I met him. And he turned out to be a lovely, generous man. Not intimidating at all.

That moment captures a lot of how I’ve moved through the industry. Back when I was working in advertising, I often felt envious of the early digital crowd—the Web 2.0 people. I admired them immensely, but they were suspicious of me. I worked in advertising, and that made me... suspect.

Brian Eno talks about scenius instead of genius—the idea that it’s not about the lone brilliant mind, but about a whole scene of people elevating one another. That’s what that blogging era felt like. If I had mentors, they came from that community—this loosely connected, mostly white, mostly male group in London, San Francisco, and New York who found each other through blogging. It had its flaws—self-satisfaction, insularity—but it was also generous and creatively nourishing. I was lucky to be a part of it.

How would you describe scenius?

Eno probably has a better definition than I could offer, but I always come back to two models—two kinds of groups that really work, whether for organizations or communities.

One is like The Magnificent Seven—a group of experts, each with their own skill, coming together with a clear mission. The other is like The Scooby Gang—a group of friends going on an adventure. For me, it’s always been the second. I prefer a group of friends figuring it out together.

You’ve spent a lot of time with the word interesting—naming events around it, exploring it. What does that word mean to you? What is interestingness?

It really began during the Wieden+Kennedy and Microsoft days. There were two of us—myself and a planner named Jeffrey Jackson—working closely on the Microsoft account. He had previously worked at Goodby Silverstein in San Francisco and introduced me to the work of Howard Gossage, a 1960s ad man who once said something like, “People don’t read advertising. People read what’s interesting. Sometimes that’s advertising.”

That stuck with us. At the time, we were trying to decode what the Nike team at Wieden was doing. They had this intuitive, almost instinctive creative process. For years, there wasn’t much formal strategy or planning on Nike. It was just, well, Just Do It. And our job was to take that unspoken brilliance and somehow translate it into something Microsoft could use. And we kept coming back to one simple thing: just make stuff that’s interesting.

We started asking ourselves that all the time: What’s interesting to us? How do you do interesting? Around that time, there was also this idea floating around the web—Flickr had an “interestingness” algorithm. There was this early, geeky optimism that maybe interestingness could be quantified, maybe even engineered. Of course, now TikTok has turned that idea into a global business. But back then, it was a kind of curiosity we kept returning to.

So when I decided to put on a conference, I needed a name—and I called it Interesting. I ran it for a few years. It was a chance to gather people together and simply share things they found compelling.

Eventually, I had to stop. It started to feel like a thing, and I didn’t want to scale it. And then this group—New—picked up the idea and launched their own event called Boring, which was a brilliant name, actually. It had that ironic twist: these are things you think are boring but are actually fascinating. It was clever. But what I loved about Interesting was its sincerity. There was no irony in it. We just earnestly wanted to share things that sparked wonder.

It wasn’t geeky or meta or trying to be clever. It was pure. Just people talking about stuff they cared about. And, oddly enough, Interesting became part of my identity. I even owned the @interesting handle on Twitter for a while. For a brief moment in time, that was actually worth something—and of course, I didn’t sell it when I should have.

Earlier you mentioned scenius. Do you think the community you were part of was a kind of scenius?

Yeah, I think scenius was exactly what it was—people loosely gathered around a shared idea, or a set of values, or just a common curiosity. You know, Brian Eno and Steven Johnson write about these cultural clusters: the Enlightenment salons, Paris cafés, London coffee shops, San Francisco in the ’60s, New York in the ’80s. We were none of those. But there was a small group in London in the early 2000s—connected to similar groups in New York and San Francisco—who were doing interesting work and sharing ideas online.

I made a lot of very close friends in that world—many of whom I’ve never met in person. But they shaped me. I’ve always liked that Eno distinction between genius and scenius. My mentors weren’t singular figures. It was the community. And it wasn’t always perfect—mostly white, mostly male, and often very self-satisfied. But it was also generous and nourishing.

Do you have a metaphor for what those communities are like?

Yeah, I’ve always said there are two good models for how groups or organizations work. There’s The Magnificent Seven model: a team of experts, each with a specialty, coming together for a mission. And then there’s The Scooby Gang model: a group of friends going on an adventure. I’ve always preferred the Scooby Gang.

I think scenius is a version of that idea—a collective intelligence that forms around a shared curiosity or vision. You know, people like Steven Johnson and Brian Eno talk about the Enlightenment, or the cafés of Paris, the coffee shops of 18th-century London, San Francisco in the ’60s, or New York in the ’80s. We weren’t that. But in the early 2000s, there was a small group of us in London doing interesting work—connected, in loose but meaningful ways, to people in New York and San Francisco.

And I made a lot of very close friends—many of whom I’ve never actually met.

Q: That’s beautiful. I want to ask about the word interesting itself. You’ve clearly spent a lot of time with it—hosting events, building around it. What does interestingness mean to you?

It really started during my time at Wieden+Kennedy, working on the Microsoft account. There were two of us—me and a planner named Jeffrey Jackson. Jeffrey had worked at Goodby Silverstein in San Francisco and knew the work of Howard Gossage, a brilliant ad guy from the ’60s. At one point, Gossage said something like, “People don’t read advertising. People read what’s interesting. Sometimes that’s advertising.”

That quote stayed with us. At the time, our job was to try to decode what made the Nike work so special and translate it into something Microsoft could understand. The Nike team operated largely on instinct. For a long time, there weren’t planners on that account. No formal strategy—just this intuitive, creative brilliance. Just do it, literally and figuratively.

So Jeffrey and I kept asking ourselves: What are they doing that works? What’s the principle underneath? And we kept landing on one idea: just make things that are interesting.

It became a guiding principle. We’d ask it constantly: What’s interesting? What’s interesting to us? How do you do interesting? Around that time, even Flickr had an “interestingness” algorithm. There was this early sense that maybe interestingness could be quantified or engineered—something TikTok has now taken to a global scale.

Later, when I decided to put on a conference, I needed a name. And so I called it Interesting. I ran it for a few years. But eventually, it started feeling like too much of a “thing,” and I stepped away.

A group called New picked it up and started their own event, which they called Boring. Which—honestly—is a much better name. It’s catchier. More intriguing. Their framing was clever: “These are things you think are boring but are actually interesting.” And I loved that.

But for me, there was something about the purity of Interesting. There was no irony to it. No wink. We were sincerely trying to share things people found compelling. Not framed in geeky irony—just real enthusiasm. It became a kind of personal anchor. For a while, I even owned @interesting on Twitter. And for a brief period, that was actually worth something. Of course, I didn’t sell it when I could’ve But yeah. Interesting has stuck with me—not as a brand or a tagline, but as a value. Something to aim for. Something to notice and chase.

And so “interestingness” became a thing that found its way to me as well. I looked into it, and then I wrote a little book about it. The publishers wanted to call it How to Be Interesting, which I thought wasn’t quite right. It was more intended to be how to make the world more interesting to you. So yeah, it’s just one of those words now that’s in my life, you know?

Yeah. Well, it also feels like—I feel like I’ve followed your work. I feel like I’ve been a subscriber for a very long time to your various newsletters, and I’m inescapable! Yeah. But you’re also very—I don’t know what the right word is. It all feels a little arbitrary and very sincere. Right? Doesn’t it? I mean, I feel like—I’ll be like, “Oh, here’s an email from Russell.” I can’t remember the last time it came, but look—this is what he’s stumbled upon. It’s sort of beautiful. It’s sort of wonderful in that way. Does that not sound familiar?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. “Arbitrary” would be a much better name for a conference. That would be very good. Yeah. Someone asked me the other day, “How do you do all these different things?” And I realized, thinking about it, that a lot of it is—I’m willing to abandon stuff. I’m not a completer-finisher, and I know that. I’m just very happy to go, “Yeah, I’m going to try this,” and if it doesn’t work, I’ll stop. I won’t beat myself up about it. And I’ve gotten good at framing things so I’m not overpromising. Interesting, for instance, is really cheap—because I’d rather not make money and also not stress about whether people thought it was worth it.

Yeah. At the end of every Interesting, I always say, “I’m not interested in your feedback. It’s only 30 quid.”

You said earlier that your skill is in letting things go—whereas other people can’t. They won’t cut words, they can’t let go of words. There's this theme you’re expressing, that you’re sort of like a ninja at letting go. What is it about you that’s made that your superpower?

Yeah. Don’t ask my wife. I’m clearly against commitment. I mean, I have been married a long time—but yeah, I think you can’t keep adding things if you’re not willing to lose some.

Yeah.

I’ve given up on a lot of things.

Yeah, beautiful. Well, listen—I kind of came out of the blue and invited you into this conversation, so I really appreciate you accepting the invitation. It was a lot of fun. Thank you so much.

Yeah, that was great. Those were really great questions.

Oh, nice. Thank you.

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